Draft INCOSE 2013 Paper
In the Scrum Agile approach
there is an important role defined for the Product Owner who is the proxy for
the Customer and who is supposed to be engaged in laying out the work to be
performed by the team by prioritizing the product Backlog. It turns out that
this is a neglected role in the literature with only a few books dedicated just
to this role, the most interesting of which is by Prichler [1], while there are many books dedicated to the
Scrum Master role. Of course the role is mentioned in many other of the basic
books on Scrum, but we would expect more explicit refinement of the role based
on the fact it is essential in driving the process. Also in larger
organizations this role becomes conflated with that of the Product Manager, and
Leffingwell suggests that the Product Owner is a transformation of that role
and that Product Owners probably work for the Product Manager on large
projects. What is called Product Manager in commercial firms is the Systems
Engineer role in aerospace. The Systems Engineer is the person responsible for
the whole product working as advertised when delivered to the customer. The
techniques that the Product Owner should draw from are those developed in
Systems Engineering as a discipline. However, we need to make those techniques
of Systems Engineering more agile in keeping with its spirit of increased
efficiency and effectiveness in product development. Here we will apply what we
learned about the essential structure of the product and its lifecycle in terms
of traceability in the paper “The Essential Nature of Product Traceability and its relation to Agile Approaches” in order
to explore the nature of this role, along with the idea of Pichler not
mentioned in his book but developed later about multidimensional backlogs.
[1] Pichler,
Roman. Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products That Customers
Love. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley, 2010.
See http://www.mediafire.com/view/?r217d28fzrlh0u1
